JOHN KENNETH GALBRAITH Quotes

In any great organization it is far, far safer to be wrong with the majority than to be right alone.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is extremely useful as a form of employment for economists

John Kenneth Galbraith

The salary of the chief executive of the large corporations is not an award for achievement. It is frequently in the nature of a warm gesture by the individual to himself

John Kenneth Galbraith

You will find that the State is the kind of organization which, though it does big things badly, does small things badly, too.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put on the troubled seas of thought.

John Kenneth Galbraith

It is a far, far better thing to have a firm anchor in nonsense than to put out on the troubled sea of thought.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Economics is a subject profoundly conducive to cliche, resonant with boredom. On few topics is an American audience so practiced in turning off its ears and minds. And none can say that the response is ill advised.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Humor is richly rewarding to the person who employs it. It has some value in gaining and holding attention, but it has no persuasive value at all.

John Kenneth Galbraith

More die in the United States of too much food than of too little.

John Kenneth Galbraith

The man who is admired for the ingenuity of his larceny is almost always rediscovering some earlier form of fraud. The basic forms are all known, have all been practiced. The manners of capitalism improve. The morals may not.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Much literary criticism comes from people for whom extreme specialization is a cover for either grave cerebral inadequacy or terminal laziness, the latter being a much cherished aspect of academic freedom.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Politics is not the art of the possible. It consists in choosing between the disastrous and the unpalatable.

John Kenneth Galbraith

Inflation does not lubricate trade but by rescuing traders from their errors of optimism or stupidity.

John Kenneth Galbraith

There is certainly no absolute standard of beauty. That precisely is what makes its pursuit so interesting.